Published: November 8, 2010

Voices: What's Next in Science

Voices: What's Next in Science

By Carl Zimmer

Scientists can’t say what they’ll be discovering 10 years from now. But they do pay careful attention to the direction in which their fields are moving, and they have some strong hunches about where they are headed in the year ahead.
Here are prognostications for science in 2011 from 10 leading figures in 10 widely scattered disciplines, from genomics to mathematics to earth science. Regardless of whether they prove true next year, they offer a glimpse into the kinds of possibilities that get scientists excited.

Heidi B. Hammel

Senior research scientist, Space Science Institute

Stuart L. Pimm

Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Duke Univ.

Jane McGonigal

Director of game research/dev., Institute for the Future

Michael J. McPhaden

Senior scientist, Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory

Ken Caldeira

Climate scientist, Carnegie Institution

David Haussler

Director, Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering

Charles M. Vest

President, National Academy of Engineering

André A. Fenton

Professor, Center for Neural Science, N.Y.U.

Rob Carlson

Principal, Biodesic

Steven Strogatz

Professor of Applied Mathematics, Cornell University

Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

Space Science

“The Dawn spacecraft will get to orbit around a very large asteroid called Vesta in July. It’s going to be fascinating to see what it looks like up close. We’re going to be able to start answering very broad questions about the history of asteroids.”

Asteroids first formed at the birth of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago, developing into small proto-planets. The biggest asteroids, like the 330-mile-wide Vesta, might have even grown into full-blown planets if not for the pull of Jupiter’s powerful gravitational field. Since then, collisions have blasted asteroids apart into smaller bodies. Astronomers want to know just how planetlike asteroids like Vesta became. It’s possible, for example, that Vesta developed a heavy core and might even have a magnetic field. Once the Dawn takes a close look at Vesta, it will move on to another giant asteroid, Ceres, which has water-bearing minerals and perhaps even a weak atmosphere. By comparing the two asteroids, astronomers hope to learn about early planet formation.

Alex di Suvero for the New York Times

Conservation Ecology

“I think this year, the time will come to get a sense of just how much marine biodiversity is out there. And that will be really exciting, because for a long time we really haven’t known. There hasn’t been a sense of what’s happening out there.”

In 2000, an international network of 2,700 scientists began the Census of Marine Life, the most ambitious attempt in scientific history to catalog the life dwelling in the world’s oceans. After a decade of trawling the seas and making 30 million observations, the project came to an end this year. The researchers unveiled dazzling photographs of some of the 6,000 or so new species they discovered.

Now they are busy crunching the data to come up with estimates of how many species of animals and other organisms are in the oceans. Next year, they may start to offer rough estimates, as well as hypotheses for why the diversity is high in some places and low in others. Dr. Pimm is particularly interested in what the census researchers will discover about how widespread species are in the ocean. On land, much of the world’s diversity is made up of species with very small ranges. Their limited habitats also make them vulnerable to human disturbances, which is why so many animals and plants on land are threatened. If the diversity of the oceans is also built on narrow-range species, such a finding might raise concern about the risk of extinction in the oceans as well.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Game Design

“We’re going to see games tackling women’s rights. We’re going to see games around climate change. We’re going to see games around medical innovation, that doctors are going to play.”

In August, the journal Nature published a paper on protein folding with 56,000 co-authors. Researchers at the University of Washington had set up a program that ran on people’s idle computers, using their free computer power to search for the accurate shape of proteins. But they eventually realized that the people who owned the computers themselves could help nudge the molecules into their proper shape. The scientists took advantage of this crowd-sourced intelligence with a game, called Foldit, that allowed people to compete with each other to become championship folders. Foldit’s community of online gamers exploded, and they’ve driven the science of protein folding forward accordingly.

The growth of broadband Internet access and computer speed has made online games a force to be reckoned with. The world spends three billion hours a week on online games, and that investment is only going to grow. Many people play war games and medieval adventures, but Dr. McGonigal predicts that in 2011 unconventional games with real-world impact will become much more prominent.

Dr. McGonigal is also the author of “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World” (Penguin, January 2011).

Isaac Brekken for The New York Times

Ocean Science

“We’re going to deploy lots and lots of new kinds of instruments in the Indian Ocean that will be out there for decades. The Indian Ocean has got these tentacles that reach across the globe, and the data we’re collecting is going to revolutionize our understanding of the system.”

The oceans, covering 70 percent of the planet, remain a barely explored world. And in that world, the Indian Ocean has been particularly mysterious. Early oceanographers paid more attention to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; today, pirates can put some parts of the Indian Ocean off limits to research. Nevertheless, ocean scientists have been finding evidence that the Indian Ocean is a very interesting place. In fact, the circulation of the ocean and its changing temperature can drive major changes in the atmosphere that can affect the entire planet.

Every month or two, these fluctuations send up towering clouds that travel east. Depending on the time of year, these disturbances can affect the monsoons over India, the rainfall in the northwestern United States or hurricanes forming in the Atlantic. Known as the Madden-Julian oscillation, it is so powerful that its winds can even speed up and slow down the rotation of the Earth.

In October 2011, an international team of scientists will be converging on the Indian Ocean for a campaign called Dynamo (short for Dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation). Deploying sensors across much of the ocean, they will try to track an oscillation from its earliest stages. If Dynamo is a success, it will help scientists understand the conditions that trigger a new oscillation and how to predict its effects far and wide.

Dr. McPhaden is also president of the American Geophysical Union.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Climate Change

“We’ll get to see whether the climate models have really improved since the last set of I.P.C.C. reports. My wager is that most of the improvements will be modest, and not represent a quantum leap in predictive capability.”

Every few years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publishes reports on the state of climate science and what we can expect from the climate in the future. In its latest report, published in 2007, the group concluded that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the billions of tons of greenhouse gases that humans have pumped into the atmosphere.

The panel also made projections into the future, basing each one on different assumptions about how human society will change over the next century. If the population peaks around 2050 and the world’s economies shift toward information technology and service industries, the panel projects that by 2100 the average global temperature will likely rise between 1.1 and 2.9 degrees C. If, on the other hand, the world continues to rely on fossil fuels for its economic growth, the panel projects a likely rise of 2.4 to 6.4 degrees.

The climate models the I.P.C.C. used in 2007 were substantially more sophisticated than previous ones. But climate scientists at the time could see plenty of room for improvement. The 2007 I.P.C.C. report shied away from giving an upper boundary for sea level rise, for example. By the time the 2007 report was published, climate scientists were already developing a new set of models for the next I.P.C.C. report.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Genomics

“You’ll have a number of reports where people will have their genome sequenced, but there will be new types of genomes being read. We can read genomes from your immune cells. They adapt throughout your lifetime so they can protect you from diseases. Reading those genomes will be important, and you’re going to hear a lot about them next year.”

It took 15 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome. Today the cost is down to $20,000, and is expected to continue to drop in years to come. As the price falls, scientists are sequencing human genomes at a faster rate. Strictly speaking, however, each of us carries many different genomes, rather than just one. Every time a cell divides, there’s a small chance that it will make a mistake in copying its genes. The mutations that cancer cells acquire, for example, are often crucial for their ability to spread and resist chemotherapy.

Immune cell genomes change as well, but most of the time those changes keep us healthy rather than make us sick. By rearranging certain stretches of their DNA, immune cells can create new genes for antibodies and receptors. The International Cancer Genome Consortium started up in April, with the goal of sequencing 25,000 genomes from a wide range of cancers. Next year, we will see some of the first fruits of this collaboration.

Dr. Haussler also predicts that the first immune cell genomes will make their debut. Both lines of research could lead to different kinds of genome-based medicine.

Cancer genomics could allow doctors to select drugs with the best chances of killing a tumor. Immune genomics could let them survey the state of the immune system as it battles infections or as it learns to tolerate a transplanted organ.

The Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering is at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

Engineering

“We’re going to see in surprisingly short order that biological inspiration and biological processes will become central to engineering real systems. It’s going to lead to a new era in engineering.”

In the 20th century, engineers and biologists dwellt in different universes. The biologists picked apart cells and tissues to see how they worked, while the engineers designed bridges, buildings and factories based on what they understood about physics and chemistry.

In recent years, however, engineers have begun paying very close attention to life. Evolution has fine-tuned living things for billions of years, giving them many of the properties — efficiency, strength, flexibility — that engineers love. Now biologically inspired engineering is taking hold in many engineering departments. In some cases, engineers are trying to mimic nature. In other cases, they are actually incorporating living things into their designs.

Researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands, for example, are developing bacteria-laced concrete. When cracks form, the bacteria wake from dormancy and secrete limestone, in effect healing the concrete. Next year, Dr. Vest expects, more of these lifelike designs will come to light, and they will keep coming for many years.

Dr. Vest is also president emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Neuroscience

“I expect we will see the physical organization of a memory within the brain.”

For decades neuroscientists searched through the brain, in pursuit of physical markers of memories. They found evidence that memories form through the contact of neurons. They grow new branches to communicate with other neurons, and old branches become stronger or weaker. In just the past few years, Dr. Fenton and other researchers have discovered that one molecule present in those branches, known as PKMzeta, maintains memories. Block PKMzeta, and the memory vanishes.

This discovery opens up an exciting prospect. Scientists could train animals to perform some simple task and then compare the brains of the animals that learned with those of the ones that didn’t. There should be a unique sprinkling of PKMzeta molecules in the animals that formed the new memory. Scientists could then map all the neurons and their branches that were required for the animals to remember what they learned. For the first time in history, scientists would be able to see a memory.

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Biotechnology

“It seems pretty likely within this year someone will show how to go from an adult peripheral blood draw to pluripotent stem cells. It means anyone who wants to try to make stem cells will be able to give it a whirl.”

The cells in an embryo can give rise to any kind of tissue in the adult body. But once they commit to being muscle cells, neurons or some other type of cell, there’s usually no going back. A huge amount of research has gone into finding a way to induce adult cells to turn back into so-called pluripotent stem cells. Someday it might be possible to use them to grow back damaged organs from a person’s own cells.

In September, Derrick J. Rossi and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School created artificial versions of RNA molecules, the templates that cells use to build proteins. They bathed human cells in a cocktail of five kinds of RNA molecules. The cells took in the RNA and made proteins that reprogrammed them into pluripotent stem cells.

Rossi’s method has a drawback as well, however: he and his colleagues used a type of cell called a fibroblast. To gather these cells, they have to do an invasive biopsy and then culture the cells to get enough fibroblasts for their experiment.

This July, Dr. George Q. Daley of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues had success using a different route: they drew blood from healthy human donors and genetically reprogrammed the cells to become pluripotent stem cells. Next year, Dr. Carlson predicts, scientists will combine these methods: they will draw a little blood, place it in a cocktail of RNA and — voilá! — stem cells. This advance would make producing stem cells cheap, fast and relatively easy. In fact, it may even be possible for dedicated amateurs to set up stem cell labs in their own garage.

Dr. Carlson is also the author of “Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life."

Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Mathematics

“We’re going to see scientific results that are correct, that are predictive, but are without explanation. We may be able to do science without insight, and we may have to learn to live without it. Science will still progress, but computers will tell us things that are true, and we won’t understand them.”

Computers have been taking over more and more of the things humans used to do, including getting driving directions and operating subway trains. They’ve even started making serious inroads into the heart of science. Rather than just churning out simulations or pretty pie charts, computers can do what scientists have traditionally done: find mathematical equations that explain complicated data. Eureqa, for example, is an “automated scientist” created by a Cornell engineer, Hod Lipson, and his students. In 2009, they reported that simply by observing a pendulum, Eureqa can rediscover some of Newton’s laws of physics.

In 2011, automated scientists are poised to make major contributions to science. Dr. Lipson and his students are looking for hidden patterns in the networks of proteins that break down food in cells, for example, and they’ve set up a Web site where people can download Eureqa free of charge and discover laws of nature for themselves.

Automated scientists may speed up the pace of discovery, but in the process they may change the nature of science itself. For centuries, scientists have solved problems with flashes of insight. But while the equations that automated scientists offer are very good at making predictions, they are often inscrutable to human scientists. We may have to program computers to explain their discoveries to us. Otherwise they will become more like oracles than scientists, handing down mysterious utterances to us mere mortals.